The Interrogation by Thomas H. Cook
Dunlap’s words struck him like a slap on his face.
A man in your position. Scottie the way he was.
He felt rage against Scottie, at the waste of his life, of his own humiliation at the petty criminal Scottie became, but much earlier, too, embarrassed by Scottie’s boyhood failures, that he did poorly in school, never had a girlfriend, avoided all physical and mental competition, showed no interest in being a cop. Was it from the long ordeal of his father’s scorn that Scottie now wanted to be released?
Released.
Burke let the word direct his mind away from Scottie and back to the comforting security of his work, back to Albert Smalls, the clear purpose at hand. He considered the transcripts of Smalls’ many interrogations. Could he have failed to notice something in them? he wondered now. A crumb in the forest. In his mind he saw a little girl stroll through the park unharmed, saw his hand upon her shoulder. If he could find something in the transcripts, then Smalls would never lie in wait for this child. She would make it safely home, grow up, have children of her own. If he did not, she would die. His eyes swept over to Scottie. Too late, he thought, too late. But for some child not yet destroyed, there was still a chance.
Midnight, Ragtag Bar, 374 Trevor Avenue
Eddie Lambrusco glanced at the Schlitz beer clock. Midnight. Half the shift behind him. Halfway home to his daughter. He knew Mrs. Wilson would be looking in on her now, making sure she was all right, but the vision of her doing that gave him no comfort. It wasn’t Mrs. Wilson his daughter should see when she opened her eyes in the darkness, not Mrs. Wilson’s hands that should tuck her in. It should be his hands. That’s what had been stolen from him, he thought. The deep satisfaction of fatherhood. Being a father. That was the one thing he was truly good at. But day by day, hour by hour, it had been ripped from him, this precious, precious thing. His anger spiked, but he choked it down. Stay calm, he told himself, remember what happens when you don’t. His fingers tightened into a lethal fist, but he forced them open. He couldn’t do what he wanted to do, what his rage urged him to do.
He glanced back to where Terry Siddell sat opposite him in the booth. The jukebox was playing at the back of the bar but Siddell had brought one of those small new-fangled radios. He turned it on and brought it close to his ear.
“What do you call that anyway?” Eddie asked.
“Transistor,” Siddell said. He toyed with one of the radio’s chrome knobs and the scratchy music increased in volume. “Transitor radio.”
“Small,” Eddie said.
“That’s the idea,” Siddell said in that superior way of his, looking peevish and resentful.
“So, what are you listening to?”
Siddell shrugged. “Anything’s better than what’s on the box. Fucking Perry Como. I’d rather listen to anything but that … or you.”
Eddie wasn’t surprised by what Siddell said. He knew Siddell didn’t want to waste a single second of his precious life with some garbage hauler. All Siddell wanted was to bull through the rest of the shift, then disappear the way he always did after work. But there were still six hours to go, and no way was Eddie going to go straight through it without a cold beer. Siddell looked like a guy who never required cold refreshment, but that didn’t matter to Eddie. He could sit and watch, the fucking twit.
Eddie took a sip from the mug. “You look like shit, Terry,” he said.
Siddell shrugged.
“Like shit warmed over,” Eddie added, taking another poke.
Siddell turned away, locked his eyes on the front of the bar.
They’d spent the last three hours cleaning out Drainage Pipe 4, scrubbing its walls clean of the weird drawing they’d found there. The entire time, Siddell had looked completely spooked, like a man going through another man’s insides. But then, what could Terry Siddell possibly know about that kind of feeling? Siddell hadn’t been in the war, hadn’t seen what a man looked like after a shell had blown him inside out. What must it be like to live the way Siddell did, safe from everything, cushioned by money and his family name, with nothing to worry about, so that he never looked the way Eddie knew he sometimes looked, especially when money was tight and the holidays were coming up, a sweaty, nervous little guy, eyes peeled back, as if constantly searching for a sniper in the brush?
What the hell, Eddie thought, try one more. “Shit on a shingle,” he said with an edgy laugh. “That’s what you look like, Terry.”
“Fuck you,” Siddell said.
Eddie laughed again, satisfied that he’d done what he could to get even, taken a couple of pokes, used the only power he had, which was the power to annoy. He smiled. Charlie would have loved it, he thought, and if he’d been there, the two of them would have gone at Siddell again and again, rubbed his fucking peevish face in the creepy little shit he was. But Eddie had mouthed off to his supervisor in the Sanitation Department, then slugged him, been fired, and so he would never again work with Charlie, never again roar at his jokes or feel the warm beam of his smile. He should have taken Charlie’s advice from the start. Keep a bright smile over that black heart of yours, Eddie. Then Charlie’s impish smile. And whistle while you work.
“How long are we going to be here?” Siddell turned off the transistor radio and sank it into the pocket of his shirt. “Fucking hours?”
“Till I finish my beer.”
Siddell frowned sullenly. “Well, don’t take all night.”
Eddie took a swig and studied Siddell’s pale face and annoyed eyes, trying to get a fix on the young man opposite him. It wasn’t that there was anything deep in Siddell, he decided, it was just that he never jawed with the other guys, never bragged about some girl he was banging or anything like that. Eddie would have felt better if Siddell were merely a guy who by nature kept his cards close to the vest. But that wasn’t it at all, Eddie supposed. He could imagine Siddell talking his head off to the other young men at the Winchester Heights Tennis Club. It wasn’t that Siddell didn’t talk, it was that he didn’t talk to people like Eddie, working stiffs who ate pork and beans out of the can and whom Siddell probably regarded as little more than pack animals.
Eddie brought the mug to his lips, wishing he were more like Charlie Sweeney. “You can do anything, Eddie,” Charlie had told him, “as long as you follow it with a glad hand and a smile.” And Charlie had proved that true, Eddie thought. Charlie had never been fired despite the fact that in certain ways he was lazy, even a tad deceitful, taking sick days when he wasn’t sick, his way of getting even. “The art of life,” he’d claimed, “is to take what you need and grin while you do it.” That was the problem, Eddie realized. Eddie was no good at grinning, glad-handing, poking a guy and making him like it because at the end of the poke there was a ready smile and a hearty laugh. To hide what you really were, what you really felt, the anger that bubbled up in you, the vein of malice that ran through your soul, that was the secret. With the right grin, you could tear their hearts out, and they’d still slap you on the back, buy you a beer, say, Hey, Eddie, go home to your sick kid. If he could only swallow the anger, the sense of being totally and forever fucked, the world could be his. But he couldn’t. That was the worst card he’d been dealt, he thought, that he wasn’t Charlie, and never could be.
He downed the last of the beer.
“Okay,” he said, wiping his hands on his trousers. “Let me give my kid a call, then we’ll hit the road.”
At the phone booth, Eddie dialed his home number. Mrs. Wilson answered.
“How’s she doing?” Eddie asked.
“The fever didn’t break yet.”
“Is she still throwing up?”
“A little while ago, but she’s sleeping now.”
“Okay,” Eddie told her. “I’ll be home around six.”
“It’s Laurie’s birthday,” Mrs. Wilson reminded him.
“Yeah, I know.”
“She’ll be expecting a little something.” Mrs. Wilson’s tone grew faintly accusatory. “Mr. Sweeney brought
“Don’t worry, I got her something too. Nice. A nice present.”
“She wouldn’t open Mr. Sweeney’s gift before she opened yours.”
His daughter’s devotion lifted Eddie’s heart, but it sank again when he recalled that he hadn’t been able to buy Laurie the little Betsy McCall doll she’d asked for. All the other girls are getting them, she’d said, and Eddie had promised, but now …
Mrs. Wilson dragged it down again. “You need a wife, Eddie.”
“The one I had didn’t think so,” Eddie snapped, his anger flaring. He swallowed hard, calmed himself. “Anyway, I’ll get home as fast as I can.”
“When she wakes up she’ll ask for you.”
There it was again, Eddie thought, the suggestion of failure, that if Eddie had anything between his ears he wouldn’t be in this fix, so strapped for money he had to haul garbage while his sick daughter cried for him. Poor provider. So poor he might not even have a birthday present for Laurie’s eighth birthday. Poor provider. The phrase his father had always used to describe the losers of this world.
“I’ll get home soon as I can,” Eddie assured Mrs. Wilson in a tone that made him cringe. “No beer after work, no nothing. I’ll come right home.” He hung up and returned to the booth where Siddell remained in his usual moody silence.
“Okay, let’s get going,” he told Siddell. “Six more hours and you can go home to your—” He stopped, wondering what Siddell could possibly go home to. A cat? A bird? Some sort of snake struck Eddie as more likely. Nothing dangerous though. A little green garden snake, eyes like glass, skin papery as a dead man’s. “Anyway, we’re in the home stretch now.”
Siddell looked at him sourly but said nothing as he got to his feet.
Siddell Carting Truck 12 rested heavily at the curb, half filled with garbage, a sickening, sweet stink wafting from its open bed to poison the air inside the working-class apartment buildings that surrounded it.
“The whole neighborhood stinks,” Siddell said glumly.
“Yeah, not all perfumy like it is in Winchester Heights,” Eddie said. He kicked the clutch, yanked the floor shift into first gear, and stomped the accelerator.
The truck lurched forward, Eddie guiding it down the narrow street, the park on one side, a long line of dingy apartment houses on the other. For the first few blocks he saw no one. Then, out of the shadows a short little man suddenly appeared, moving rapidly along the park side of the road, the wind billowing out the sleeves of his dark green parka.
Another loser, Eddie thought as he watched the little man grow small in the rearview mirror, then disappear around a dark corner at Vandermeer and Cordelia.
Didn’t stop who?
12:09 A.M., September 13, 379 Vandermeer Avenue
Dunlap whirled around the corner and headed down Cordelia, moving feverishly, like a small powder keg trying to outrun its own burning fuse.
So, okay, fuck the Chief, he told himself. So, okay, I didn’t learn nothing. What now?
He stopped and tried to think it through, but the clatter of the garbage truck that had just lurched past had distracted him so that he had to get his mind around the problem once again. So, okay, I got to get somebody, he thought.
His short, squat legs scissored rapidly down the avenue while his mind reeled off a list of possibilities. There was Louis Farkus. Louis had the balls. No, not Farkus, he decided. Louis Farkus didn’t have a car ever since that midnight visit from the repo man. Okay, so, all right, what about Skeeter McBride? He had a Pontiac. A Pontiac but no balls. The job required a set of balls. Not brass ones. It wasn’t that tough. But a set of balls nonetheless. Other names surfaced, then fell away for various reasons, men too sick, men who couldn’t be trusted, men too smart to be conned into doing it.
He reached the corner of Bradford and Cordelia, and still no one emerged who really fit the scheme. So all right, okay, the second string, guys he’d have preferred not to use but now had no choice but to consider. Ziggy, maybe? No. Bill Dexter? Forget it. Spike Patucci? Perfect save for the little matter that he was psycho. Then suddenly, a name separated from the pack. A guy with a car. A guy who had balls. Best of all, a guy who could provide a reason for being where he was. Dunlap smiled. So, okay … him.
12:17 A.M., Interrogation Room 3
“So, how old is she, Jay?” Cohen asked. “The girl in the picture.”
“I don’t know.”
“It was the only picture you drew in that tunnel,” Cohen said. “You could have drawn a boy. A grown-up. A dog. Anything, right?”
“I guess I could have.”
“So why did you draw this little girl?”
Smalls shrugged.
“It’s not a bad drawing, Jay. A lot of detail. Like she was standing in front of you. A model. It’s hard to imagine that you never spoke to this kid.”
Smalls said nothing.
Dead end, Cohen thought, his heart sinking. He leaned back in his chair, placed his hands behind his head, and to his surprise Blunt’s voice sounded in his head, talking about how Cathy hadn’t been sexually violated, the fact that this had, in Blunt’s mind, signaled a more difficult case to break.
“You know, one of the detectives has been wondering about something,” Cohen said. “About why Cathy wasn’t raped.”
Smalls drew in a breath.
“We figured maybe she’d been killed as part of a robbery, but would a man kill a little girl for nothing more than a little silver trinket?”
Smalls remained silent.
“So this other detective thinks that the killer hadn’t been a thief at all. He’d planned to rape Cathy. That was the whole idea. Of course, if that were true, why didn’t he do it?”
“Maybe he got scared off.” Smalls spoke with what struck Cohen as a curious assurance.
“You mean the guy heard somebody coming, something like that, and got scared off?”
“If someone saw him, then that person should have stopped him.”
“I didn’t say that someone saw him, Jay.”
Smalls’ hands spasmed on the table.
“What’s the matter, Jay? You look a little … upset.”
Smalls shrank back, glanced about, as if searching for a place to hide.
“You’d like to just disappear, wouldn’t you, Jay? Become invisible. The Invisible Man. That’s what we call him, you know. That first guy you told us about. The one in the playground. The one you said Cathy was afraid of. The Invisible Man.”
“He wasn’t invisible,” Smalls muttered.
“No, he wasn’t, Jay. Because Cathy saw him, didn’t she? She saw him look at her, notice her, single her out.”
Smalls’ gaze fled to the window.
“She saw him move toward her, close in on her, reach for her. She looked him in the eye, didn’t she, Jay?”
Smalls did not respond.
“She felt his hands on her throat, didn’t she.”
Smalls began to rock forward and backward.
“But nobody else saw this invisible man, right, Jay?”
Smalls dropped forward with a soft moan and pressed his face against the table.
“And so nobody stopped him from killing Cathy.”
Smalls whispered something, but Cohen couldn’t make it out. “What?” he asked.
The whispering continued, Smalls’ cheek against the table, smothering the words.
“Sit up, Jay.”
Smalls did not move.
“Sit up,” Cohen said hotly.
Smalls’ vehement whispers continued.
Cohen leaned forward, grabbed Smalls’ shoulders, and forced him upright.
“Slime, slime, slime.” Smalls’ face was transfigured by disgust.
“Who?” Cohen asked. “Who’s slime?”
“Me. Because I didn’t stop him.”
“Didn’t stop who?”
“The man who scared Cathy.”
Dead end, Cohen thought. “The Invisible Man,” he murmured,
12:21 A.M., City Park
Sanford and Zarella were waiting at Drainage Pipe 4 when Burke arrived.
“We have information that something pertaining to the murder of Cathy Lake might be buried at some point along the path that runs from here to the duck pond,” Burke told the two cops. “So we’re going to walk the path slowly, checking for any sign that the ground along the way has been disturbed. This is very important. You need to be alert to anything that looks out of the ordinary. Anything at all. Understood?”
The two patrolmen nodded.
“Okay,” Burke said. “Zarella, take the left side of the path. Sanford, you take the right. I’ll walk along behind both of you and recheck right and left.”
And so they passed through the tunnel, flashlights on high beam as they moved along the edges of the pathway, carefully brushing back anything that got in the way of a clear view of the ground.
They’d made it halfway to the pond when Zarella stopped abruptly in front of a small marble statue of a dog. “Sir. This might be something.”
Burke peered at the ground. In the gravelly earth he saw evidence of claw marks, a place where something, perhaps human fingers, had raked the earth back.
“It could just be some animal digging,” Zarella said. “Dog. Squirrel.”
Burke put out his hand. “Give me the spade.”
Zarella instantly obeyed.
“Keep the light on the blade,” Burke said. He bent forward, inserted the blade carefully, then withdrew and inserted it again. As he dug, he could feel nothing but the ground’s gritty texture.
After a moment, he straightened and stepped away. “Try the shovel.”